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1. Alex Kirk Marooned

The world was a mystery to Alex Kirk, and his own existence was an enigma within that mystery.

He kept a wary eye on three rippers as he hunted and fished along the shore of his tropic domain. Nature had made some changes in the past million years. New flowers had grown fantastically large atop stems resembling tree trunks, growing in the ocean’s edge. Some were carnivorous, with sticky surfaces to trap insects and small birds, so the flower’s petals could close up while it slowly digested the struggling prey. Multicolored butterflies large as Alex’s head fluttered about—in reality evolved, diurnal bats. They had pink bodies covered with a light gray fuzz of hair, and their four limbs straddled those wings (resembling the bright yellow and red tree-flowers) with tiny claws at the elbow and knee joints. These butterfly bats fed on certain types of non-carnivorous tree flowers, but there was a gray variety of bat that were blood drinkers. Alex loathed the latter with the same primordial human instinct of repulsion by many-legged crawling things. He avoided the nocturnal bloodsuckers.

The rippers constantly shadowed him from the beach across a run of cold, foamy seawater, looking for an opening so they could kill him. They would not reach him out here on the sand bars and on the stumps of these fantastic new tree-flowers. A sea breeze made palm trees rustle as Alex foraged so he could eat and stay alive. Sunlight intensified colors and made him squint, but he never lost track of his enemies. The rippers were afraid to cross the fast-flowing tidal stream or they would long since have made a quick meal of him. He had taught them to stay out of range of his deadly, poison-tipped arrows. Several piles of bleached ripper bones lay half buried in sand—a reminder to stay out of his bow range.

Hot sand crumbled between Alex’s toes and warmed his bones. He’d fashioned a hat of skin and feathers to shield against a blinding sun in a powder-blue sky. He was a dark-haired, wiry young man with soldiering in his blood. It showed in the alert, confident way he carried himself and the weapons he’d fashioned from stone and wood.

Alex loved being alive despite life’s dangers and its loneliness. He liked the warmth of the sun. He liked the smell of vegetation and ocean, the wind in his hair, the thunder of surf. Seagulls uttered raw screams as they kited overhead in moist air under billowing white cumulus clouds. He loved life itself, and vowed to make the best of it, although sometimes despair nearly drove him to end it all. What he would not give for another soul to speak with, but there would never be another. It was tempting sometimes to just swim across a narrow channel of water and let the rippers take him, but he had a strange faith that something more was meant for him in this existence.

Every day, Alex hunted and fished along the tropical beaches of his small domain. He wore a stone knife in his belt and carried a bow and arrows as he hunted under a powder-blue sky with a few high cirrus clouds. Every afternoon in the tropics, huge billows of white cumulus clouds on the horizon would send brief but intense rain showers, but other than that it was humid and clear under a blinding sun.

Each evening, he would eat comfortable supper by a fire after dark, in the safety of his little redoubt high on the bluffs overlooking a nameless sea. The magnitude of his misfortune was so incomprehensible that he brushed it off, but deep down wondered what had gone wrong. More than once he asked the unanswerable question: Why?

A full moon floated in the blue sky over reddish mountains. The moon looked hazy citron among spindly palm trees that shimmered in wet air. Near the moon hung, always, a gray smudge whose explanation Alex could not find in his memories.

As he went about his simple work, Alex sometimes remembered images and sensations that half drove him mad: cities and roads, skylines and jet airplanes, the touch of other humans, especially the woman he loved, Maryan...He could not find a shred of evidence that she or any of it had ever existed.

In his dreams when he slept in his hut at night, he floated down rainy neon streets of a lost world. Those dreams were filled with the scent and the music of Maryan Shurey, the woman Alex Kirk had loved.

The dreams were always about the same. Sometimes he spent a long time floating over a cityscape to get there. He floated through the sky in some fantastic vehicle they must have had back then. The skyline was filled with massive buildings that shimmered lightly in a fog of light, and in that shimmering mist were thousands of tiny square window lights making a sprawl like some alien alphabet that must have meant something to someone, some comforting but exciting message loaded with promises and urgency. Then he lay beside her in a room where they had made love. She slept by his side, with a contented look on her face. He lay awake, savoring the moment. Nearby stood a metal ice container from which protruded an empty champagne bottle. The remains of a fine seafood and pasta meal were hardening into a crust on expensive heavy cream hotel china near the window. In the blue-black darkness, a television set flickered silently, its volume set to Mute. On the television, an ice cream truck slowly turned a corner. On the corner, a store front said Ito’s News. The scene was from a picturesque little town in upstate New York someplace, a slice of Americana. One could see the rustling elm trees of Beacham on one of those summer days when the air is filled with scents of mown grass and hot melting tar. A little girl leans out from the ice cream truck. She is cute as a button, with missing front teeth, freckles, and reddish bangs. The sound cuts in: “Hey, what flavor would you like? Chocolate? Vanilla? Or Strawberry?” She’d fold her hands together, incline her head to one side so her locks bounced, cute as a button, and she’d say: “Personally, I prefer strawberry. That’s because it’s my favorite color. Don’t you think?”

Those dreams were so vivid he sometimes woke up thinking he’d made love to this woman who must have died a million years ago, whose very dust had turned to atoms and maybe floated among the stars by now.

Later in the day, Alex headed home with the plump bass he’d caught among the tree-trunk flowers. Huge butterflies fluttered overhead, sometimes briefly blotting out the sun with their undulating movements. The rippers’ rankness wafted toward him across the narrow saltwater channel as they bounded along growling at him. The smell of his fish, and their long patient waiting, had made them hungry. They took turns to paw the water’s edge, urging him with hooting and barking noises to come over to them. He ignored them.

A faint shadow briefly dimmed the sky with a sizzling, crackling noise. Alex nearly dropped his fish, and the predators scrambled for cover.

Startled, Alex looked up. He stared across the wide bay with its rippling tidal waters. He heard a loud bang that echoed from horizon to horizon. A chrome streak appeared and instantly vanished into a forest on a hill two miles across the bay. The sky was bright as ever, and a fine thread of vapor quickly dissipated, drifting away in the powder-blue sky.

The world looked as though nothing had happened, but some instinct told Alex his life had just become infinitely more complicated and dangerous.